Doing morning hikes through the forests of Medong at 5.30am had also an educational benefit. I´m happy to share my newly won knowledge with you. I might have been an ignorant, but about the origin of pineapples or palm oil I wasn´t really aware of.
Cameroon is one of the 10 ten countries providing over 90% of the worlds´ cacao production, about 125.000t/a. The sweet fluid of freshly harvested Theobroma cacao beans can be sucked. Otherwise the cacao is fermented and dried to get the
Also Coffee is cultivated to be exported. 
The beans are white and hidden in a thin soft shell which changes colour from green to red when maturing. 
Harvest is just once a year which is about the time right now. Unfortunately the price has fallen over the years and came down from an attractive 500CFA / kg in the 70ties to a 150-200CFA nowadays (650CFA = 1Euro). Hence less and less people take the effort.
Bananas and plantains are probably grown everywhere and everybody who has a tree around the house is likely to be owner of some bananas. Whereas the leafs of plantains show a slight red coloration and devoted for diverse plates, bananas are merely fruits to eat. 
But I needed to learn that there are even subtle differences within the plantain and banana family and none tastes like the other!?
Further carbohydrate providers are Manioc and Macabo, a yams variety.
Both fruits grow in the soil and the roots need to be digged out. 
Gambos are some strange vegetables which are sliced and lend a unappetizingly slimy consistency when cooked in sauces. 
In contrast Ananas comosus 
and Carica papaya offer some nice fruits to eat.
These greens resembling the pest weeds in your backyard are called “ondolet”. 
Their actual origin and purpose I don´t really know and eaten raw it´s awfully bitter. But cooked and pureed beyond recognition it can be quite tasty.
Another essential plant of Cameroon is the peanut. 
Eaten either freshly harvested, dried, roasted or caramalized, as snacks everywhere sold in the streets for 100CFA. (the nuts are found in the soil – as the German expression might indicate “Erdnuss”).
Also palm trees can offer much more than a nice tropical appearance.
Beside the famous Cocos nucifera, the Elaeis guineensis, the Oilpalm, is mainly cultivated all across Cameroon. To gather the fruits one need to climb high up in the trees. 
Afterwards they´re pressed and the collected oil is boiled and purified to be sold in used Tangui water bottles. 
That Persea americana thrives high up in these trees was barely known to me. 
The first one to find a fruit gets an avocado for free.
Nothing eatable but important for export reasons is the caoutchouc cultivation. Like all things in Cameroon the rubber liquid takes its time to drip down the tree..
Everything what´s left behind by the collectors is gathered by the children of the surrounding villages to fabricate some balloons for their own.
All in all this is just a small extraction of the rich variety of what nature can offer around the equator. Everything else you need to discover for yourself..
